"Buried Treasure in Virginia?"

Millions of dollars' worth of gold buried in the hills of
Virginia? And a 150-year-old treasure map made up of secret
coded numbers?

It sounds like a scene from an Indiana Jones movie - where
"X" always marks the spot, but only if you can figure out
how to read the map before the bad guys do!

Get ready for a real American folktale of buried treasure and
three coded messages that have stumped both professional and
amateur codebreakers for decades.

'There's Gold in Them Thar Hills!'

Sometime in the early 1800's, gold miner Thomas Jefferson Beale
buried a pile of gold (worth about $30 million today) in the hills
of Bedford, a small southern town in Virginia. He also left
a lockbox containing three pages of coded numbers and a letter
of explanation to Robert Morriss, a local innkeeper.

But this is where the story gets murky. The original Beale codes,
the lockbox, the letter, not to mention anyone who could verify
the story, are all long gone. What does exist of this fantastic
tale is a pamphlet written by an anonymous friend of Robert
Morriss, which was first published in 1885. It tells the tale
of the Beale treasure and includes coded pages containing
hundreds of numbers, plus a copy of the letter Beale wrote in
1822 to the innkeeper.

Apparently, Beale instructed Morriss to open the box after 10 years
if no one claimed the buried gold, and a trusted friend would send
along the key to decipher the coded pages. Well, the key never
came and Morriss forgot about the box until many years later.

He gave up trying to decipher the coded pages himself and turned
them over to the anonymous pamphlet writer, who insisted that
after several years he successfully decoded the second letter,
using the Declaration of Independence as the key. He matched
each number of the code to the first letter of the corresponding
word in the Declaration, then listed all the first letters of
these words.

The result is the following sentence: I have deposited in the
county of Bedford, about four miles from Buford's (reportedly
an old tavern), in an excavation vault...one thousand and
fourteen pounds of gold, silver and jewels.

Our mysterious pamphlet writer also claimed that the first
encoded letter contained the location of the treasure, and the
third letter had the names of the miners the gold belonged to.
Neither one of these letters has ever been deciphered, even
though thousands have tried, including cryptologists at the
National Security Agency (NSA) outside of Washington, D.C.

"Well, anything is possible," says Armand Vallieres, a resident
of Riderwood Village in Silver Spring, Maryland, and a former
CIA careerist in intelligence work. "But it could also be a
puzzle that has no solution."

One of the great cryptologic minds of the 20th century, William
Friedman, spent some 30 years trying to solve this puzzle. Known
as the patriarch of the NSA, Friedman was considered by many in
cryptology to be a leader in deciphering encrypted messages. "If
you tell me Friedman worked on this, that's all I need to hear,"
says Dick Vayhinger, who was a cryptographer at NSA for 27 years
and now lives with his wife, Martha at Riderwood Village. "He
was the best."

But even Friedman couldn't crack this code. "It's all a matter
of using the right key against the cipher stream, which turns
your numbers into words," says Dick. "But coded messages can
be simple or enormously complicated; they can take five minutes
or five years to solve."

"And if William Friedman could not solve it...," he trails off.

'Town Without Pity'

Which brings us to the amateur sleuths and fortune hunters. The
town of Bedford has seen them all. "It's the idea of getting
something for nothing that gets them every time," says Ellen
Wandrei, managing director of the Bedford City and County
Museum, whose gift shop does a brisk business in selling books
about the Beale treasure.

She says the citizens of Bedford have seen their cemetery illegally
excavated, trenches dug in the apple orchards, and a silo moved
for digging. Mostly though, they see people come and go, spending
a lot of money in the process.

"There seem to be two main groups," she adds, "retirees who are
interested in solving the codes, and younger people who want to
get rich quick."

Start Digging - In a Book!

Encrypted messages have been a part of history for a very long time,
says Mr. Vayhinger. "Queen Elizabeth used them during her reign."
His advice to Beale treasure hunters is to find a book on codes
and ciphers and start from there. "I used to work the New York
Times crossword puzzles for years," he says, "and that was one of
the questions I was asked during my job interview at NSA - 'do you
work crossword puzzles?'"

What do you think? Is the Beale treasure a real-life fortune
just waiting to be discovered or the mother or all fish tales?
"We want you to come to visit us in Bedford and see if you can
solve the mystery," challenges Ellen Wandrei. "You'll never
know if you don't try."